John Swinburn

I heard back from my primary care physician this afternoon. I was surprised to hear back from him, after the lambasting I gave him for failing to respond to my phone calls and online messages. His reply suggested that he had only just seen my messages, as they are funneled through staff for handling so he doesn’t see all of them. I felt like a jerk. I sent him an apology.

He mentioned in his message that he’s spoken with my oncologist. The two of them believe, subject to information provided by the as-yet-unscheduled biopsy, that I am a surgical candidate to remove a portion of the right lung where the tumor is located. I wish I could get the damn biopsy scheduled ASAP. The oncologist’s office called today to tell me the first available date for the biopsy is October 31; however, I learned that they had scheduled it to take place in Hot Springs, while the doctor recommended I go to Little Rock for the biopsy. So I told the scheduler and she said she would get back to me. Nothing yet. I do have other tests on the calendar. This Wednesday morning, I go in for a lung function test. Then, next Monday, I go in for a CT scan of my head. The oncologist wants to know whether there are any issues suggesting cancer has spread into my head (she says nothing suggests that has happened).

Naturally, commitments I’d previously made had been thrown out the window. The only things I think I’ll be able to complete as committed this week are: 1) smoking a pork loin for Friday evening’s dinner with the church Long Range Planning committee; 2) attending said dinner and planning session; and 3) spending all day Saturday at the church, participating in a congregational long range planning workshop. Though I signed on for those things, they no longer hold the appeal they once did.

I had scheduled an appointment for today to see a Nurse Practitioner who works with a dermatologist. I kept the appointment. She prescribed something that I am to apply to my scalp three times a day for a week or so, then reduce over time; that should eliminate the itching I feel on my scalp. I sure hope so. Otherwise I may have to scalp myself. But, of course, when I went to pick up the prescription, it was not ready. Late this afternoon the pharmacy called to say it was ready. But we were about to leave for an evening engagement, so the drugs remain locked at the pharmacy. Maybe soon.

I’ve mellowed since allowing myself to be consumed by ennui’s second cousin in the wee hours of the morning last night. Thanks to messages from good female friends,  I have forced myself to awaken from my morose stupor. (I don’t know why I used female as an adjective just now; I may have to examine that one day when I return to my explorations of my mind.)

Tonight, we attended the last HSV Open Mic Night of the year. It was well-attended, with around 200 people in attendance. The guy who agreed to take the reins from me last year seems to have done an admirable job; better than I was doing. I remain proud that I grew it from babyhood to an audience of 150, but the guy who took it over has done better than I could have done. The fact that he’s a musician and knows lots of local musical talent helped. And his professional history as an impressario of sorts didn’t hurt, either. Regardless of the reasons, he excelled beyond what I was able to do with the event. More power to him. Tonight’s acts were excellent, by the way. And I saw my friend Craig, the venue manager, and let him know of my health news. Unlike some folks, I don’t feel compelled to keep my diagnosis a secret. I rather prefer to put it out there, in the open, so I don’t have to remember who is in on the secret and who isn’t. It’s selfish, but it serves a purpose.

My wife made apple pie this afternoon. She planned to make it yesterday, but I was perfectly willing to put it off. It’s my birthday pie. I shun birthday cake. Birthday cake is for conformists. I bend just enough to allow for a sweet pie. I’d actually be even happier with a savory pie, make with meat or perhaps shrimp or lobster, but I’m already stretching tradition by eschewing birthday cake. I need to maintain my membership in the North American middle class; if eating sweet pie accomplishes that objective, so be it.

I am trying to remain upbeat and, for the most part, I’ve been successful. A couple of meltdowns have proven to me that I’m not the tower of strength I never thought I was. But I’ve been pretty solid. I’m feeling reasonably solid tonight. I just can’t imagine having to maintain this sense of solidity while facing a snail’s pace of action on the part of the medical community. Waiting weeks for a vital test seems unreasonable to me. But so does turning people away because they have no medical insurance.

On an utterly unrelated note, I learned today that in Garland County, where I live, the early voting ballots failed to include the Democratic candidate for Arkansas Secretary of State. By the time the error was caught, 220 people had already voted. Voting was stopped and a new ballot will be available as soon as possible. But those 220 people who didn’t have the opportunity to vote for a Democrat for Secretary of State have every reason to be enraged. I doubt the county will do a damn thing to rectify the situation for those voters.

Until this very early morning, I’d done only a little research into lung cancer and its treatment. Now, after having explored the matter a bit, I wish I hadn’t done my investigation. Ignorance, they say, is bliss.

Unless the doctors have been utterly wrong, my prognosis involves the potential for some truly unhappy experiences. Surgery for lung cancer is invasive, dangerous, and involves an extraordinarily unpleasant set of circumstances. It’s not simply “cut into the chest and remove a tumor.” It’s far more involved than that. Typically, a patient spends five to seven days in the hospital following surgery, with a tube (or tubes) coming out of his chest and attached to a special canister to allow excess fluid and air to drain out. I remember the chest drain after my open heart surgery fourteen years ago; it’s ugly and unpleasant. At least that was a temporary situation that led to a more positive outcome.

Lung cancer surgery is messy stuff. It’s painful from the start and the pain and discomfort lasts for quite a while, from what I’ve read.  According to material I found online at cancer.org, the complications of surgery can include “reactions to anesthesia, excess bleeding, blood clots in the legs or lungs, wound infections, and pneumonia.” The site goes on to say, “While it is rare, some people may not survive the surgery.” The site doesn’t explore options. Such as “what if the patient opts against surgery?” I am thinking about that now. I just realized it’s only a few minutes past 2:30 a.m. I thought I woke up a bit before 5:30 a.m., but I fooled myself. And I’ve just about finished my first cup of coffee.

Here’s what I found on a website of the National Institutes of Health:

In fact, many patients with NSCLC (non-small-cell lung cancer) have been cured by surgery. However, there are also many cases that fail to achieve a cure following surgery. In fact, 30% to 55% of patients with NSCLC develop recurrence and die of their disease despite curative resection. Therefore, many patients eventually die of their disease due to recurrence after surgery. Furthermore, surgery itself possesses a certain amount of risk. Although treatment-related death is relatively uncommon, there is still a significant risk of mortality, and most patients experience a decrease in lung function after surgery. Thus, despite the advances in surgery, treatment by surgical resection is less than perfect, even when a complete resection is possible.

“Most patients experience a decrease in lung function…” Is that something I’m willing to live with? Until I began looking into the realities of the disease, I had been under the impression that I was facing something uncomfortable and deeply troublesome but not truly deadly. “This is 2018,” I said to myself. “Lung cancer killed my father, but that was many years ago. Advances since that time must have made the disease less deadly.”

That’s what I told myself. But the more I explored it, the more I came to realize I had been deluding myself. Lung cancer hasn’t become any less deadly. It’s just as lethal today as it was when my father died. Maybe it takes more time to do its dirty work today, but it still does its dirty work.

So, as I contemplate this new information, I have to ask myself: Is it worth going through the misery of a fight whose outcome is not subject to any positive guarantee? Would I have more time to experience life more fully by simply rejecting treatment altogether than by spending time in a hospital and at home as a wounded invalid than by subjecting myself to treatment? I suppose I need to listen to doctors and surgeons, rather than depend on a Google search to inform me about life or death matters, but I don’t want to delude myself into thinking “oh, they’ll just do surgery and my problem will be solved.”

I realize, of course, that I’m exploring life and death decisions in the middle of the night, relying only on Google for my facts. And I realize that’s stupid and the information upon which I’m relying is probably not the most trustworthy. I know I need to talk to oncologists and surgeons and others who really know the topic. I know that. But I know, too, their jobs are to give patients hope, even when hope is a candle whose wick is short and unlikely to last very long. I want to know what’s real, not what’s possible in a fairy-tale world.

I realize, too, that I’m making a lot of assumptions. I haven’t even had the biopsy yet. But the oncologist’s matter-of-fact suggestion that surgery is the likely first step in treatment led me to bypassing a bunch of possibilities and wishes and hopes. Though I have no desire to ignore real “what if” scenarios, I have no interest in escapism for the sake of delaying the onset of reality. The fact that the medical professionals have found what appears to be a 2.6 cm mass in my right lung is serious. The likelihood that it’s malignant, borne out by the PET scan “brightness” scale, is more serious, still. The oncologist’s comments that essentially dismissed radiation and chemo as first lines of defense/treatment suggests the tumor is, indeed, a serious matter. All the “stuff” I’ve read that presents lung cancer as a damn serious and often fatal disease makes me think, again, that “this could be serious.” Could be, hell. Is. And that’s scary.

I’ve not “given up.” There’s more to learn, of course. It’s possible that I might live a perfectly happy and reasonably healthy life for years to come after surgery to remove a piece of my lung. But I don’t want to fool myself into thinking such surgery is likely to leave me “well.” One isn’t “well” if one is missing a significant piece of one’s lung, methinks.

All of this thought of  what it might be like to be me after surgery suggests I’m being very, very selfish. What about my wife? What does she think? Good question. She’s not apt to share what she thinks. She’s never been one to open up that way. I guess she might open up if she were to think my thinking runs counter to hers. Absent knowing, though, I can only base my thinking on what I think and what I know and what information flows my way.

My father’s death from lung cancer was horrible. He was in constant pain for at least the last few days. Morphine did little to relieve his agony. I don’t plan on suffering through what he went through. I’m just not willing to do that. On the other hand, I don’t want to cut things too short too early. I know. It’s very early to be thinking such stuff. But that’s what one does in the wee hours when one has nothing else to occupy the emptiness.

The best part of melting into a puddle of hot wax, gravity spilling it into low spots in one’s mental terrain, is that hot wax eventually cools and becomes malleable. After a day and an evening of allowing myself the luxury of fear and anger, this morning I’m cooling into a lump I can mold into something presentable. One must be presentable on one’s birthday, mustn’t one? Yes, today marks my official entry into geezerhood, though I’ve been claiming membership since I was in my early fifties. I’ve said for years that one becomes a geezer when one “attains adequate age and eccentricity.” Inasmuch as I am by proclamation the arbiter of the definition of geezerhood, I get to decide the adequacy of both attributes. Pretty slick, huh? There are days I’d like to be the arbiter of things of more grave import, like whether all members of a governmental administration are subject to being dispatched through the use of a heavy-duty wood chipper. All right, enough of that little slither toward darkness!

Today, I reached sixty-five years of age. That stuns me. I have always believed I was destined to be younger than that. And I believe it still. I am no more sixty-five years old than doughnuts are made by mixing cement with powdered meat. The very idea is anathema to me! Okay, I’ll admit my physical age has reached that spot on the calendar. Mentally, though, I feel very much like an adolescent, still poking around my psyche in the hope of finding something that, once and for all, allows me to understand and articulate who I am. Apparently, adolescents are slow on the uptake. That something obviously doesn’t exist. Finally, on the morning of my sixty-fifth birthday, I’m coming to realize that we never finish understanding nor articulating who we are; we’re in a process of perpetual change. There’s no moment in time at which we can say with rectitude, “This is precisely who I am,”  Defining this is a lifelong endeavor. And it’s never finished.

For most people, though, the pursuit of the unanswerable question of who am I? does not become a fixation the way it seems to be for me. Most people either get used to the idea that they’ll never know or they delude themselves into thinking they do know. But I have never been able to satisfy myself in those ways. Even this morning, as my sixty-fifty year begins to unfold and I’ve just announced that I know the question can never lead to an answer, something nags at me. Intellectually, I understand that the question has no definitive answer. But emotionally I think the answer is there, somewhere, hidden under a hitherto unused fold of cerebral matter. If I look long and hard enough, I’ll find it. What I’ll do with it once I discover it is beyond me.

But back to the wax with which I may mold myself into something presentable. If I allow it to cool too fast or harden too much, I’ll become stiff and inflexible. But if I attempt to shape it before it cools enough, I’ll flow into an unrecognizable flow of goo. The key is to allow the wax to reach and maintain a fictile stage, a point at which I can bend and shape myself to respond to the world around me.

I vaguely remember thinking, as a teenager, that I needed to leave some of my youthful attitudes behind me as I entered adulthood. I still feel that way. Some of my ideas and attitudes about life are better suited to a teenager than to an avowed geezer. I guess I’m still wrestling with adolescent angst at an advanced age. And I’ll keep seeking an answer to that unanswerable question: who am I, at my core?

The mind can wander into strange places, miserable dark alleys littered with the carcasses of dead animals and reeking with the stench of drunk old men defecating in their clothes. One’s mind can saunter into dangerous territory when the pressure is on. By pressure, I mean  fear steeped in anger and intensified by a mixture of too much wine and a few shots of whiskey.

I didn’t plan to wade into an acrimonious mood last night, but that’s where I went. The more I thought about the fact that my doctor never returned my call, after I returned his, the more upset I became. I allowed myself to grow more and more upset with him until, finally, I drifted through those dark alleys and smelled their ugliness. I  reacted.

I logged into the patient portal and unloaded on my doctor, sending him a message expressing my anger that he didn’t return my call and hadn’t bothered to respond to an earlier portal message.  In the clarity of early morning darkness many hours ago, I realized there may have been a thousand reasons he didn’t respond. He might have been ill and didn’t make it to the office. He could have faced an onslaught of patients sick with the flu. His computer might not have been functioning properly. His staff may not have delivered my phone message to him. So many possibilities. But I focused on the one that fit my mood, that he simply ignored a patient, the most important patient: me. I suspect he might decide he doesn’t need nor want a patient like me. He doesn’t need an ungrateful patient who fails to recognize that the doctor has other patients, some of whom might actually be more needful of his attention.

Goddamn! I thought I was perfectly capable of handling admittedly bad news like an adult. Instead, I soaked my self-pity in alcohol and lashed out in anger at someone I might need to help me maneuver through the morass. Dumb shit. Okay, I’ve done enough self-inflicted damage and have engaged in sufficient self-recrimination. What’s done is done.

If an as-yet unconfirmed diagnosis can have the effect of making me lose it like that, how am I going to handle the results of the biopsy if they are what I expect? That’s my concern at the moment. How am I going to respond to actual data that support the diagnosis? I’ve been just fine with this entire process as it unfolded until last night and then suddenly I allowed myself to fall apart, basically, and lash out at my primary care physician. Fortunately, I did it on my computer in the privacy of my study. It could have happened in his office. I should be kept in a cage.

***

Hours, I mean MANY hours, have passed since I wrote the paragraphs above. I was unwilling to post them because, by so doing, I would have admitted to being the deviant prick I’ve turned out to be. Well, what the hell. I am who I am. I wish I were someone else, but I think I’ve written recently about wishing. It’s a fool’s game, the passtime of idiots.

Tonight, my wife took me out for my pre-birthday celebration. We went to a new restaurant in Hot Springs, a place called 501 Prime, that I believe is by far the best restaurant Hot Spring has seen since I moved to the area. I had ribeye. My wife had prime rib. I started with a combination plate of oysters on the half-shell; the oysters were east coast and west coast…maybe a Gulf oyster. My god, they were orgasmically good! As was the beef. And the Beefeater’s gin martini. And the no-name cabernet sauvignon. Damn! What a nice meal! As stupid as it may sound, I thought as I was eating the dinner that the meal could have been my very last high-end dinner. You know, I was thinking that cancer could eat away at me faster than I could get back to an upscale restaurant. That’s such bullshit. I deserve better than to treat myself like a blundering imbecile. Christ!

On the other hand, I have to recognize that, if the lung cancer diagnosis is confirmed, things could go south in a hurry. So I need to prepare by making my plans apace. It won’t hurt me to create a plan that won’t be used. It can help to create a plan that might need to be used sooner than I might want.

Jesus! My mind is wandering where I would rather it not go! Let me focus, instead, on French rosé and the beauty of the restaurant that served our meal tonight. I think it’s a biblical verse that says, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.” 

I promised myself that I wouldn’t get all maudlin, nor would I go overboard with fear or regrets, over this diagnosis. And I need to force myself to grow up and stick to the plan, the plan in which I behave like an adult. Okay. I’ll do it. I will. Starting right now.

I thought a while ago about the fact that I’ve never participated in an orgy Who thinks such things? Okay, enough. I’ll post this and wonder why I didn’t have the good sense to treat this post like so many other “drafts.”

Here it is, my 2700th post on this blog. That’s the number of actual published posts. One hundred eighty-nine additional unpublished drafts wait in the wings. I wrote about ten of those drafts last night. I’m glad I didn’t publish any of the ten I wrote last night. They would only reveal how much of a phony I am, how my facade hides the person I’d rather not reveal. Ha! I openly reveal quite a lot of my flaws, so the ones I hide must be truly astonishing. Indeed.

Lately, my posts have veered away from fiction and poetry, my two favorite things to write, and into journal entries about my life experiences. I am not sure whether that’s good or bad. My fiction and poetry have potential, I think, so ignoring them is apt to cause what skills I have to corrode and weather and weaken. My non-fiction and rants and the like hold little promise, but they might one day remind me or someone who matters to me what was on my mind during what is shaping up to be an odd time of my life. So I don’t know. Lately, nothing I write seems to grab me by the collar. Yet I continue to spoil blank screens by filling them with words.

2700 posts. That translates into 7.39726 years’ worth of posts, if I had posted just once a day. I can’t possibly have had enough ideas worth sharing to merit so many posts. So I can only conclude that I suffer what some would uncharitably call diarrhea of the fingers. Some people speak just to hear themselves talk. I type just to see what I’ve written. It’s not all bad. It’s almost impossible to produce that many posts without something decent spilling out from time to time. But the sheer volume makes it hard to wade through and find those rare gems that might merit consideration for inclusion in the “collected works.”

I’m not in the mood for writing in celebration of my 2700th post this morning. But at least I recorded the event for posterity. You can’t ignore posterity. Unless you’re the Republican party under 45.

My cardiologist’s nurse just called to say my stress test was normal. I told my wife this morning that I hoped the nurse would return my call to report the doctor was stunned that my heart was healthier than that of a twenty-five year-old professional athlete. “Normal” is okay, though.

Now, all I need is for the next series of tests and biopsies and the like to have similar findings and I’ll feel compelled to treat my body better than I have thus far.

I told myself I’d document this chapter of my medical experiences. To anyone who has signed up to receive automated email announcements of my posts, let me apologize for the multiple intrusions. At least this was a happy (from my perspective) intrusion.

I had my PET scan this morning, which is about all I can say about that. It was only mildly uncomfortable to stay motionless on a table for about twenty minutes while the machine took pictures of the inside of my torso. I have no idea what it showed, nor when I’ll learn what it showed. Perhaps I’ll know when I meet with the oncologist on Friday afternoon, the doctor to whom my primary care physician referred me for a needle biopsy.

While I was at the clinic undergoing the PET scan, the oncologist’s office called in the hope of having me visit with her during her time in the Village today. I would have been happy to, except that I was having a PET scan less than fifty yards from her main office. My cardiologist’s nurse called while I was being PETted, returning my call, to say she does not yet know the results of my cardiac stress test, but that she’ll call when she does. I’m surprised it takes so long.

I’m still calm about the entire process so far and I don’t see any signs of that abating. As the song says, “Que será, será.”

On the way home from my PET scan today, I stopped at recycled clothing stores, where I spent a total of $9 on two pairs of slacks and one windbreaker jacket with the old Hot Springs Village logo embroidered on it. The slacks are a bit snug, which is one of many reasons I’m planning to starve myself a bit in the coming weeks and months. I’ve allowed myself to grow into the corpulent old man I told myself I would not permit. I’ll fix that bastard!

This evening, we are meeting friends for dinner at a restaurant on the far side of the Village. Saturday evening we’re going to 501 Prime for dinner, an early celebration. Sunday is my 65th birthday. “Que será, será.”

Old Whitesboro Christian Church

After Restoration

Several years ago, when we still lived in Dallas, after we closed our business and retired, I had the idea of restoring an old church. It came to me during one of our aimless weekend drives in March 2013. We stumbled upon the town of Whitesboro, a town directly north of Dallas between Gainesville and Sherman, and noticed an old church building on one of the town’s main streets with a “for sale” sign in front of it. It has been a Christian Church once upon a time, but had long been abandoned. I had the idea that we might buy the church, restore it in some fashion, and create a business in the unique space. On whim, I took the real estate agent’s name and contact information and made a call. I learned that the sellers were asking $45,000 for the property. I didn’t have that much readily available at the moment (yeah, like, I’ve EVER had that much readily available), but it seemed to me like a steal, even with the knowledge that it would require a lot of restoration. So I contacted a friend and asked, half joking, whether he’d like to go halves withe me and restore the place. He, too, was a shade short of cash. And, of course, I suspect it would have cost an additional $100,000, at a minimum, to make it usable. At any rate, the idea went nowhere, though it nagged me for a long, long time. I really wanted to buy that place. But I knew nothing of Whitesboro and its market for…anything. Coffee house? Event center? Wedding chapel?  Who knew? I didn’t.

So it was best that I didn’t buy it, I decided. But I learned one recent afternoon, returning online to visit the whim five years later, that someone bought it in May 2013. And they restored the old church into an event venue that, apparently, caters mostly to weddings. I found the venue’s website, but it doesn’t say much; mostly, it’s a site with “romantic” photos of weddings and photos of the accouterment intended to recognize and celebrate special relationships.

I’ve explored dozens of opportunities—make that multiple dozens of—to invest in a business or a building or an idea that I’ve opted for one reason or another to abandon or pass by. I wish I had a time dislocation device that would enable me to interrupt the space-time continuum for just long enough to see what would have become of my investment had I not turned away from it. (“To have used “time machine” in the previous sentence would have been lazy and uncreative, if somewhat less pretentious,” he said to himself.)

I’ve been more productive at writing the last few days than I’ve been in quite a while. Not cranking out novels, mind you, but behaving in ways that resemble what I was doing a year or two ago—writing enough for three or four blog posts a day and then some, plus some stuff that won’t find its way to the blog. That being the case, and because I’ll be otherwise occupied off and on in the next few days, I decided to schedule a few pieces to post automatically early in the morning. This is the first such early morning piece, written long before it posts.

The other day, as I stumbled through excerpts of well-known writers’ reflections on writers and writing, I came upon something intriguing. A recent post from Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings made me stop and take notice. She writes of a gathering Jorge Luis Borges organized in October 1982 at which Susan Sontag spoke to a reporter who covered the event. Sontag said, “There is no writer living today who matters more to other writers than Borges. Many people would say he is the greatest living writer … Very few writers of today have not learned from him or imitated him.” Of course Borges has been dead for more than thirty years now, but I think Borges’ influence remains strong. I’ve not read enough of his work; indeed, I’ve read very little of it. But what I’ve read has, indeed, been influential. And what I’ve read about Borges and the comments about his work from others has been influential.

A particular comment attributed to Borges struck a chord: “All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.” Those misfortunes include all the personal traumas, large or small, that we encounter throughout our lives. It’s as if, as writers, we’re being fed a constant diet of new resources from which to choose to include in our work. It’s all source material.

When I write fiction, I write from experience. The experience need not be real, though. It can be imagined experience that sprang from combined past experiences that occupy just the right spaces in my brain at just the right time.

I’ve never tripped at the edge of a cliff, my heart in my throat,  falling in panic toward my oblivion on the rocks a thousand feet below. But I’ve tripped on a sidewalk in the direction of a concrete curb that, had I hit it with my head, could have killed me. The panic I felt in an instant as my face raced toward the sidewalk informs my senses enough that I can translate that experience into an imagined experience in which I’m hurling toward the cliff’s edge. As Borges said, “our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments” are raw material for what we write. In that vein, I try to look at my every experience as fuel for what will eventually feed the pages I write. I try. I don’t always succeed. Sometimes, I cannot distance myself from my ugly experiences to the extent that I can think of them as opportunities. But I can look back on them and file them away, expecting they eventually will make their way to a page.

Other quotes from Borges make me laugh. The following comment, though apparently spoken in frustration at having been overlooked for years for the Nobel Prize in literature, struck me as remarkably clever: “Not granting me the Nobel Prize has become a Scandinavian tradition; since I was born they have not been granting it to me.” I can honestly say that sounds like something I might write.

Another comment from Borges seems to get at my perpetual question about who am I, at my core, stripping away all the influences on me: “I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities that I have visited, all my ancestors.” I am not sure I exist, either. The way Borges put it, none of us do. We are not individual beings. We are simply formless vessels filled with sponges that, as they soak in experiences, fill out into the shape of whatever it is we define as who we are. Put another way, though Borges’ comment was sufficient, “I am simply a mirror, reflection of the people I’ve met and the experiences I’ve been through.”

No, that is too simplistic, of course. That perspective suggests I have no control over who I am and that I am being created in the image of the world around me. I believe we have control over who we are. That is to say we can’t blame our failings and our foibles on experience. We have a responsibility for taking our experiences and molding them into who we wish to be within the context of the resources available to us. But there’s no question our experiences and the people with whom we interact combine to shape the people we become and continue becoming throughout life. I am not the person today I was as a young man of twenty-five. I am not the person today I was when I was forty-five or fifty-five. The person I am today is not the person I will be ten years hence.

Obviously, I’ve gotten a bit off track. That’s okay, as far as I’m concerned, because it allowed me to think about certain things in ways uncommon to me. I feel better when I’m curious and exploring ways of satisfying that curiosity.

I used to envision myself as the poor-and-unhealthy-man’s version of Anthony Bourdain. He was a grey-haired and large, well-muscled and weathered handsome guy, compared to me—salt-and-sand hair, a smallish and softly corpulent physique, smooth-skinned, and fundamentally homely. But we shared many of the same interests, tastes, and philosophical approaches to life. In reality, equating myself with Anthony Bourdain in any form or fashion is utterly arrogant and deeply wishful thinking that speaks forcefully against reality. I only wish. But last night, I heard a recording of his conversation with a guy in Indonesia, a Brit by the sound of the guy’s voice, during which the conversation turned to what the two of them would want done with their bodies upon their deaths. The Brit suggested a party of sorts, with his body burned and returned to the universe from whence it came. Bourdain wasn’t interested in a party. He opted to be “found dead” in the woods, where his body would be consumed by forest creatures and recycled. He also suggested being put into a wood chipper and sprayed against something or other. I missed part of that, and I may be glad I did.  At least that’s what I remember from both comments. I can relate to both of them.

Despite the obligatory detour from my originally-intended comments here, I am back to my desire to be someone “like” Anthony Bourdain. I want to witness the world with an open mind. I want to condemn the injustices I see and report them to the world, encouraging the world to join me in condemning them. And I want to do this while enjoying other cultures and their cuisines, not through haute cuisine but, instead, in kitchens of regular people for whom kitchens do not represent livelihood but familial or communal interaction.

My wishes and desires and dreams do not lend themselves easily to narrative. They find better expressions in poetry and vignette, emphasized through the occasional tirade and irrational rant. Yesterday, following church service, a smallish group of us engaged in conversation after watching a TED Talk delivered by Jonathon Haidt, who discussed the moral roots of liberals and conservatives. The talk was eye-opening and instructive. It revealed aspects of myself that I wish I could hide. It also allowed me, oddly, to look into Anthony Bourdain’s mind. I have tried for an hour to express just how that came to be, but I can’t. I will just say the video had impact. And I think I came to understand why Anthony Bourdain committed suicide and why I could follow suit one day. I’m not suggesting it’s on the immediate horizon (in fact I adamantly assert otherwise), but I think I can see how I might reach the conclusion that suicide is the best choice for me and for those I would leave behind. His exposure to the world revealed glorious aspects of this planet and the life forms that live on it. But his experiences also revealed ugliness that ought not to occupy humankind in any form on this planet. When one reaches the point of believing the ugliness outweighs the beauty, I think it’s time to go. I can imagine that would be my choice. And if the people I left behind were left with the option of dealing with a crotchety old geezer who sees nothing but the worst in all of us or the memory of a curmudgeon who loved the strange challenges of life on earth, I think they’d prefer the early departure of the latter by his own hand than the lingering insistence on living through the misery of a prolonged departure.

I don’t know what demons prompted Anthony Bourdain to hang himself. His death hurt me for a lot of reasons, but I wish his memory well and I wish those who mourn him better times ahead.

Anthony Bourdain and I shared a passion for food and, I think, for culture. He was far better at exploring both, but he was in a sense a role model for those of us who wish we could have lived his life. Lately, as I watch my culture slide into an abyss of our own making, I long for a culture like his in which his complaints can be heard and embraced by millions. But our culture today is more apt to eschew any contributions Bourdain might have made, calling him a commie or a socialist or a pussy. That’s one of the things that makes suicide attractive. But I can’t imagine reaching that point, not really. Not as long as there’s food to explore, a woman who loves me, and an opportunity to complain bitterly about so much for which there is to complain. Damn you, Anthony Bourdain! It might have been my turn to die!